[webmobdev]

A friend from India is a recent immigrant (arrived on H1-B) and is now a US citizen. He is working for a company that also has a lot of fellow indians on H1-B visa. His salary is rougly 50% higher (for the same profile), and he gets to go home by 6 PM while they still slog with all the extra work they are expected to do.

[manuelabeledo]

Ignoring the fact that H-1B visa holders have to be paid a “prevailing wage”, which makes extremely difficult for them to be 50% underpaid, are you suggesting that your friend has kept the same work profile as recently arrived workers for well over ten years?

I have know Indians who, after almost two decades in the country, finally managed to get ahold a green card. Most I have worked with, have been on H-1B visas for at least eight years. It is hard to believe that someone would have left his or her home country, for a specialized and well paid job in the US, but haven’t progressed at all in the seniority scale in decades.

[webmobdev]

"Prevailing wage" doesn't mean equal wages because there's no such thing - there's a payscale for every position, and it is different in every company. And H1-B visa holders invariably get the lower end of the payscale (often the lowest). This ends up being even lower when they arrive through indian IT consultancy firms.

> are you suggesting that your friend has kept the same work profile as recently arrived workers for well over ten years?

I have no idea where you got that idea from. He married a US citizen, and became one himself after a few years. As soon as he became a US citizen, he got an offer from an indian IT consultancy firm with a pay hike of $75,000 based on his multi-national experience / expertise and, ofcourse, the fact that he was a US citizen.

[manuelabeledo]

> "Prevailing wage" doesn't mean equal wages because there's no such thing - there's a payscale for every position, and it is different in every company. And H1-B visa holders invariably get the lower end of the payscale (often the lowest).

I went through this process, and when they calculated the prevailing wage for my position, it was a number, not a range. It is calculated as the average of wages for all similar positions, in the same place of employment, and there is a minimum of $60,000, as far as I understand, at least for H-1B visas.

If a company were to pay less to visa holders than to their peers, it would be committing fraud.

> I have no idea where you got that idea from. He married a US citizen, and became one himself after a few years.

Essentially, because applying for US citizenship takes several years. Green card through marriage may take up to 3 years, and US citizenship takes at least another 5, so that may make around 8 years. I assumed your friend came to the US as a professional with a H-1B visa, and went down the full process, from H-1B, to green card, to citizenship, which, for an Indian national, may take even decades.

Point is, if this person was making around the same amount of money as recently arrived visa holders, even after several years in the US, and only started receiving better wages with a change in citizenship status, there must be something else to it. Either way, it seems strange that a H-1B holder would stay in a position for many years, without no effective wage increases at all.

> As soon as he became a US citizen, he got an offer from an indian IT consultancy firm with a pay hike of $75,000 based on his multi-national experience / expertise and, ofcourse, the fact that he was a US citizen.

Sadly, that is the modus operandi of certain IT consultancy firms, especially Indian ones.

It may be fraud. It is not like this has not happened before[1][2]. But this does not mean that the system rules are broken, it may mean that the enforcement of such rules is inadequate.

To clarify, earning $75,000 more than people in a similar position is not fraud per se, but people making less than the mandatory average is. And given that H-1B visa holders must make at least $60,000, I'm not capable of understanding how this company calculates prevailing wages without committing blatant fraud.

[1] https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/technolo...

[2] https://theworld.org/stories/2014-01-02/indian-tech-worker-h...

[WesolyKubeczek]

I think loopholes are possible and are being used whenever feasible. What if prevailing wage is uniformly low, it’s just that employees who are more equal than others receive bonuses?

[manuelabeledo]

If wages are low, H-1B workers wages would still be on par with those of their peers. It is already illegal to set wages otherwise.

There is a minimum prevailing wage per level, set by the government agency in charge, and bonuses and other incentives too count towards median annual wages.

The H-1B program is flawed, yes, but not for the reasons most people think of. It is effectively used by many IT consultancy companies, especially Indian ones, to bring workers to the US, and essentially keep them captive through several methods.

[marcellus23]

Working hard or being motivated to work hard isn’t the same thing as being a good employee though. We’ve all known employees who work hard (or think they do) but don’t contribute much, or cause problems in other ways.

[WesolyKubeczek]

I still think there’s a problem. If they are smart enough to go through the infamous circles of interviews at the fucking google and be deemed worthy, then work through the circles of immigration hell, and then you see they are working hard but not smart enough, I dunno, have you tried talking to them? It’s not like they became stupid overnight.

[marcellus23]

I don’t think getting through interviews at Google implies anything more than being good at getting through interviews at Google.

[WesolyKubeczek]

But at this point it's Google's problem, moreover, a problem it inflicted unto itself, especially since they make people jump through all the hoops and organize long, multi-stage interviews, complete with tricky questions, specifically to make sure they find people who really know their shit and weed out con persons.

I mean, you know and I know that passing exhausting interviews and actually doing work are two distinct skills (I, for one, blanket refuse to apply for any and all jobs where there are more than two interviews), but it seems that some large companies think they know better than that. Well, they can cry me a river.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Lemme guess, the non-cititens also dream of getting residence or citizenship and work humanly hours and go home at six while their slack will be picked up by the next wave of serfs. Bonus if they can boss around some.